Stanford is now offering free robotics courses. Get cracking!

Rough schedule today, hence the laziness

• Doing what I couldn’t with TotJot, and sounds just as nice - TotSpot. The company is presently in private beta, which is something we didn’t do at TotJot - our engineering arm built a solid, extensible platform and then we decided to go the PR consulting route (despite having PR experience on the team already). Bad move (along with overbuilding the backend infrastructure before having a real user base), but the concept is still bright, and I wish TotSpot all the best. Mashable is presently handing out some invites.
• What has eight letters, begins with an “F”, and may turn out to be a very useful web utility? No, not Facebook…Freebase. I tinkered with Freebase some time ago, and now Alex Isgold has an update on the open database platform.

And last but certainly not least…

• Democracy sans justice - A kindergarten teacher allows their students to vote an autistic classmate out of the room. Worse - it wasn’t done by secret ballot - the child was forced to stand in front of the classroom while this public humiliation took place. Even worse - the teacher admitted the case, yet has been placed in an “administrative position.” I wouldn’t let my dog within 50 miles of this teacher.

Adam Ostrow:

While I might expect a start-up going after the early adopter techie crowd to take so much for granted, this is Microsoft, the world’s largest software company that is virtually unavoidable in at least some part of everyone’s digital lives. But Microsoft has made no effort to explain what RSS is, how to use it, and why it might matter to people outside of the Xhundred thousand (or however many) people use RSS religiously.

Agreed, wholeheartedly (and Microsoft isn’t the only culprit either).

Well…maybe. There is no doubt that if sys admins could lock down their users machines, you’d solve a lot of issues, but that isn’t really feasible with all the new tools flowing in the door. Everytime someone downloads a new program that doesn’t require admin rights, someone else is going to develop an exploit.

There is no quick fix for this, whether it be under Windows, UNIX, Linux or otherwise. All you can do is educate.

Several high school students are in potentially scorching water after hacking into their school district’s computer network to change some grades and grab a few tests.

These students were obviously very concerned about their grades, and getting into a good college is supposedly very competitive nowadays. Unfortunately, they may not get there, which in a strange way, is…well.. unfortunate. They were talented enough to get into the system - they might have been talented enough to help out some college with their security issues.

I was asked to skip a couple of grades when I was in school. I don’t think it was because I was smart, but more because I was a hassle in class. The teachers just wanted me moving onward (and outward from their presence). I didn’t do it because I always had a crush on some cute girl, and didn’t want to leave. The result was I never got the girl.

Now a young boy from Korea is taking skipping grades to the extreme, as he has been accepted to the physics department at a university.

I think he will wind up without the social interactions necessary to make him a well-rounded individual. He may have all the book smarts, but he will never get the chance to develop the emotional intelligence to guide him.

Not that there is a direct correlation between social development and skipping grades - I didn’t skip and I am still a total geek.

The old saying “its not what you know, its who you know” is losing steam. In a world on instant startups and flourishing home offices of one, what you know is becoming much more important. But it isn’t all important. How you use that knowledge is what really counts.

Peter Drucker proclaimed over a decade ago that “value is now created by productivity and innovation, both applications of knowledge to work.” It is exactly those productivity gains and innovative new products and services which kept the US at the business forefront for the last decade plus.

Unfortunately, while our education system and its home-grown beneficiaries produced much of our work, times are a-changing. Some are beginning to wonder if the United States is becoming anti-science. If it is true, and the fervor spreads, a lot of what Thomas Friedman warns us about in The World Is Flat may turn out fact. US institutions educate foreigners, our “work” makes it easy for them to return home with that knowledge, and a few folks are left wondering what the hell happened.

This isn’t some “close our borders” mantra. The bottom line is some people are extremely motivated - the fact that they aren’t necessarily born in the US to US born parents makes no difference. They are doing it, and others are not.

The tools exist for people to turn their knowledge towards creative, widely beneficial endeavors.

Whether you use your knowledge is up to you.

The Guardian covers a story about how students fair poorer in testing when they have access to computers to assist them in their studies. I end up getting the frank report from a technology blog. I don’t know which is worse, the computers in the classrooms, the calculators used to do the statistics for the study, or the journalist who buried the facts behind the policy flip flopping, at the bottom of the story.

In Pupils ‘do worse with computers’, a study notes that the students do worse when equiped with computers. This study contradicts results gleened from the same data, some time ago. The piece points out the source of the data near the end, and glosses over anything behind that data.

So I check out my daily technology news, one source of which is the ever poignant TechDirt, and end up getting the scoop (see How Computers Make Your Stupid… Or How Stats Are Used To Mislead?).

I guess I will just drop the mainstream news, and read more “dirt.” It seems more informative, and frankly, I love the sarcasm.

I was impressed that Telus of Canada was utilizing RSS to get their marketing message on the street (see RSS Marketing for more on how this works). I was even more impressed that the message was a quick and dirty, common-sensical guide on avoiding phishing exploits. Take a look at Gone phishing – forged e-mails, spoofs and scams - myTELUS, and tell me what you think.

I think it is one more example of taking care of your users.